


Don't Fear the Reaper

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Marauders' Era, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-11
Updated: 2006-01-11
Packaged: 2019-01-19 13:01:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12410775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: She’s taken James away from them, taken away their unspoken leader. He is no longer just a Marauder; he is no longer just Prongs. He is a Marauder and Lily Evans’s boyfriend, and that minor distinction makes all the difference in the world.





	Don't Fear the Reaper

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

Don’t Fear the Reaper

**Summary: She’s taken James away from them, taken away their unspoken leader. He is no longer just a Marauder; he is no longer just Prongs. He is a Marauder and Lily Evans’s boyfriend, and that minor distinction makes all the difference in the world.**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing.**

&&&

A companionable silence has settled between the two young and wearied adults seated slumped and defeated at the scratched oak table in the cramped and cluttered kitchen of the uniformly cramped and cluttered London flat. The silence that has fallen, the informed observer can’t help but notice, is no longer fraught with the awkwardness and electric tension that might have been present only mere months ago; no, they’d long since blown through that phase with both of their characteristic explosive zest and enthusiasm. Rather, the silence is one of reassuring comfort and well-practiced ease. Both heads are bowed dutifully over his or her respective meal, one lowered head boasting tangled curls a shade of the deepest crimson, the other, a full head of silkily smooth, jet-black locks. The only sound stems from the clinking of silverware and an impressive belch emitted forth from the mouth of the grinning man with black hair.

The woman, the one with the scarlet hair, reaches across the table for her beer, unintentionally knocking a fork and various stained slips of parchment to the yellowed linoleum floor as she does so. The fork clatters loudly as it hits the ground, and the parchment follows the silverware’s descent at a more leisurely pace, settling haphazardly on a floor that is already strewn with debris of varying import and purpose.

The man takes a swig of his own beer and chuckles softly, and the woman rolls her eyes at his calm acceptance of the sorry and disorganized state of his flat. It’s his flat, of course, not hers; she can’t imagine ever living in such disordered squalor. He’d purchased the small, unimpressive residence with money inherited when he was only sixteen or seventeen. He’s nineteen now, but he’s never looked for a larger place. He’s rarely home anyway, he figures. It’s really only a brief rest stop, a place to eat and sleep.

“There’s no place like home,”� he says, breaking the silence with a smirk. “You _did_ insist on eating here, Lily.”�

“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto,”� his female counterpart replies with a small smile as she cuts her meat with refined but work-hardened hands. “It’s a bit small — there’s no use denying that — but I think it’s got promise. Really, Sirius, if you’d just pick up after yourself every once in a while, maybe it wouldn’t look like an abandoned crack den in here all the time.”�

The man, Sirius, shrugs a graceful shoulder. “I never thought I’d stay here for long,”� he admits. “We always said we were going to go in on a flat together after Hogwarts, y’know? Me, James, Remus, and Peter. It’s what we always said.”�

The woman nods her head sympathetically — and, Sirius notes, a bit guiltily, as well. “Oh, come on now, Lily,”� he prods soothingly. “Don’t go blaming yourself again. No one ever said you were a Yoko.”�

Lily rolls her eyes for a second time and tucks a strand of red hair behind her ear. She knows it isn’t her fault, really, she does. She knows it’s the war, it’s circumstance, it’s Remus’s lycanthropy, it’s Peter’s new job at the Ministry, and it’s Lily’s, Sirius’s, and James’s increasingly uncertain, increasingly dangerous work as Aurors fighting in the frontlines of the seemingly futile battle to stop Voldemort.

It’s growing up. It’s adulthood.

But she longs very suddenly for the laughing, carefree, _inseparable_ boys she remembers from her schooldays. James with his self-assured, confident charisma (often treading the fine line of all-out arrogance) and his stanch loyalty to his three best friends. Sirius with his bark-like laughter and explosively boisterous wit and intelligence. Remus Lupin with his unassuming manner yet droll and acidic tongue. And Peter Pettigrew with his uncertain smile and desire only to please his three closest friends.

She’d never liked the four of them — the Marauders, they’d called themselves — much then, but she misses those phantom schoolboys now — misses their childish pranks, their uncanny ability to communicate to one another without the benefit of words, and their unreserved exuberance and ambition toward all things in life.

And she knows that on some level, it _is_ her fault that they’ve changed — even if just a tiny bit.

She’s taken James away from them, taken away their unspoken leader. He is no longer just a Marauder; he is no longer just Prongs. He is a Marauder _and_ Lily Evans’s boyfriend, and that minor distinction makes all the difference in the world.

“We could all do it,”� she says very suddenly, her dark green eyes alight with impulsive excitement. “We could rent out a flat for all five of us. James would love it, I know he would….”�

She trails off as Sirius shakes his head slowly, gray eyes unusually solemn, a clear rejection of her spontaneous proposal.

“He’s going to ask you to marry him, you know.”�

He drops it like an anvil, and for a moment there is silence again– but this one is not comfortable and familiar. This one is charged with tension. It’s charged with unspoken questions and unconscious resentments.

“Not any time soon, I’m sure,”� Lily says finally, briskly, knowing that to deny the validity of his statement completely would be ridiculously absurd.

Sirius shakes his head again. Their mismatched plates and tarnished eating utensils lay forgotten before them, their beers half-empty and growing warmer and staler by the minute.

“It _will_ be soon, Lily,”� he disagrees. “Can’t you feel the panic beginning to crawl up into your stomach and throat to suffocate you? We’re all just waiting for our last day to live here. We’re all just waiting to die.”� He catches Lily’s gaze, and she holds it steadily, feeling instinctively that she must acknowledge the truth in Sirius’s words. “James doesn’t want to die without you by his side.”�

“Dorcas,”� Lily says abruptly, swallowing loudly, and she’s surprised to hear her voice is grainy with emotion. “Dorcas was my _friend_ , Sirius. And she was only _twenty_.”� Despite the seemingly sudden leap of subject, Sirius’s expression is one of perceptive understanding and compassion. “She wasn’t ever given a chance to grow up, to become an adult. It’s being snatched away from us, all of us, one by one. I shouldn’t be thinking about marriage when I’m just barely nineteen. I shouldn’t be thinking about weddings and funerals and losing my best friend forever. I shouldn’t be wondering whether my boyfriend is going to make it home alive tonight.”�

Outside the small, dirty window of the kitchen, rain falls in heavy, weighted sheets of gray, icy and unforgiving. Lily watches the beaded droplets splash against the windowpane and remembers chasing James Potter across the muddy, slick grounds of Hogwarts during a rainstorm, furious with him over something trivial, something she can’t even remember now. She remembers James’s eyes dancing with mirth, and she remembers the passion he incited in her that, at the time, she mistook for hatred.

She remembers this and smiles, just barely, a nostalgic upturning of the corners of her lips.

Sirius notices and asks, with a small smile of his own, “What’s funny?”�

“I’ll marry him,”� Lily says decisively, her smile growing, butterflies of hope and anticipation forming inexplicably in the pit of her stomach. “I’ll marry him now.”�

She feels overwhelmed by an emotion poignant and indefinable, sitting here with Sirius, both of them equally exhausted and scared after another long and fruitless day at work. He isn’t only her boyfriend’s best friend, and he isn’t only her work partner, the Auror with whom she stares down death every day.

He’s a part of her in some strange, obscure, and unexpectedly subtle fashion. He’s someone she loves, fears, respects, and resents. He’s someone who makes her lash out in unrestrained bouts of anger, laugh until her sides hurt, and cry until she’s left blotchy-faced, ashamed, and sated.

“Of course you’ll marry him now,”� Sirius scoffs with a grin reminiscent of the younger, less hardened boy Lily once knew. “There was never any question of that.”�

And they both grin stupidly, fear and trepidation falling away to reveal the unmarred optimism and youthful enthusiasm that still thrive hidden within each of them.

She never would have imagined a day when she’d be sitting in Sirius Black’s small, dimly lit kitchen, talking marriage and emotion, but it has snuck up on her nonetheless, and now she’s torn between laughing disbelief at how quickly misconceptions and misjudgments can dissolve and an overriding sense of just how reassuringly normal this all feels. 

The transition from foe to friend to family hasn’t been seamless, and it hasn’t been without its awkward moments, but it has been something undeniably profound and inescapable. Her life, she has come to realize, is intertwined just as much with Sirius Black’s, Remus Lupin’s, and Peter Pettigrew’s as it is with James’s.

_You marry one_ , she thinks, _and you adopt all four_.

And staring across at the man sitting next to her, feeling honored and a little afraid that he has trusted her so completely with James’s heart, she knows she is okay with that.

Because this cramped and cluttered kitchen is home now because home is wherever those four boys are. And she can imagine Peter in the empty seat across from Sirius, yammering on excitedly about his new responsibilities at work. She can see Remus by the sink, cleaning up after Sirius, smiling kindly as he listens to Peter breathlessly prattle on. And there’s James, shoving Lily over in her seat so that they’re sharing it, one of his hands holding fast to Lily’s, the other shoveling food onto his plate as he laughs and jokes boyishly with Sirius.

It isn’t what she’d dreamt of as a child, and it’s certainly not what she’d predicted as an adolescent at Hogwarts– but it feels so right she’s afraid her heart might break.

_If this is waiting to die_ , she thinks, _it’s not all bad_.

&&&

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